When a surveyor traveled through Henry County in southeastern Iowa in the early 1800s, he wrote that much of the tallgrass prairie was so marshy after rains that it was “fit only for ducks.”

That description was later amended to include Swedes, who began moving to Iowa in the 1840s, encouraged by pharmacist Carl Sundries and a farmer named Peter Cassel. Both men hailed from Kisa, a small town in Ostergotland province south of Stockholm. Where others saw mud, these Scandinavians saw fertile soil that could be turned into productive fields if the land was tiled and drained.

Hundreds of Swedish families eventually settled in the area to farm and continued to emigrate to the area until the 1920s. In 1864, they founded the aptly named village of Swedesburg, which is 43 miles south of Iowa City off Highway 218. Never a large community, the town at its height had a population of roughly 100, and there are even fewer residents there now. The imposing Lutheran Evangelical Church — long the heart of the community — still stands in the center of the burg.

What draws most visitors these days is the village’s Swedish American Museum, established in 1991 in one of the former general stores. It’s filled with 19th-century farming, homemaking, school and other artifacts. Then there’s Ole, a 14-foot-tall, reddish-orange fiberglass dala horse. These colorful horses — usually made of wood — originated in the Dalarna province in Sweden, but over time have become a symbol of the entire country. Ole was made by the Sparta-based Fast Corp.

Though Iowa only has a population of 3 million, it’s also home to two other respected Scandinavian heritage museums. The Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum is in Decorah, 30 miles west of the Mississippi in northeastern Iowa. And the Museum of Danish America is in Elk Horn, 85 miles west of Des Moines.

I stopped in Swedesburg on a recent visit to Iowa to see family and then catch the California Zephyr Amtrak train to ski in Colorado with my two teenage kids. In addition to inspecting the museum, we attended Christmas Eve services at the Swedesburg Lutheran Church, participating in a community tradition more than 150 years old.

Candice Boulton, who runs the museum, said the first settlers — many of whom were poor sharecroppers in Sweden — wrote home of their good fortune after they set up their homesteads. Compared to the rocky ground they’d farmed in Sweden, the rich land of southeast Iowa must have seemed amazing, she said.

Boulton said the Swedish mass immigration movement to the Midwest began with Cassel, who — like Sundries — was convinced that America offered a brighter future for them and their countrymen and women. Though the pair were successful in their homeland, she said life was hard for many people in the area, which was overpopulated and had a rigid caste system, heavy taxation and a repressive religious leadership.

Boulton said poverty and alcoholism were rampant there and landowners paid their workers poorly. So in May of 1845, Cassel and Sundries organized a group of 121 people from around Kisa to emigrate to the United States. Their journey across the Atlantic from the west coast of Sweden to New York took eight weeks.

“The immigrants were an industrious, hard-working bunch who were ecstatic to have their own farms. Nor did it hurt that the men were tall so they could dig deep to lay tile to drain the wetland around here,” Boulton said.

“In addition to the church — which burned twice before they eventually built a brick structure — Swedesburg had several general stores, a bank, barbershop, hardware store, blacksmith and wagon-making shops, millinery and dress-making stores, a doctor’s office and a carpentry shop, which also produced caskets and wicker cooling baskets, where corpses were kept for a short time.”

She said the exhibits in the museum help explain the immigrant experience, starting with the simple trunks the travelers used to haul their meager belongings to America. Like most of the other museum artifacts, she said the trunks came from within a five-mile radius of the village.

Boulton said the museum has hymnals, confirmation books and other church-related items, many of which are in Swedish.

“The church played a central role in the life of the immigrants and their offspring,” she said. “And many of the services were bilingual well into the 20th century. In addition, the schools also taught the Swedish alphabet and language."

Early farm implements are also on display, as are a several musical instruments from the 1800s, including a psalmodikon, which was used in place of an organ in the simple pioneer churches. In addition, the museum has homemaking items that show how women of the time decorated their houses and made food in their kitchens. There’s also a geneology section, with many binders packed with information on the immigrants and their descendants as well as a map of Sweden, spiked with pins showing the hometowns of Swedish visitors.

Behind the museum there are three more buildings. One is a tin-smith shop that includes a huckster wagon — a smaller version of a Conestoga — used by delivery men and peddlers. There’s also a general store and a stuga, a small Swedish cottage painted a coppery red color known as falun red.

In addition to Ole, the big dala horse, Swedeburg has a julbok, a large goat made of straw that is part of the traditional Christmas celebration. This goat is at the corner of Highway 218 and 140th Ave., which leads into the village. Alas, vandals have burned it twice, but a group of museum docents who have rebuilt it after each torching say they hope it will make it through the coming summer and fall.

More information: The Swedish American Museum is at 107 James Ave., Swedesburg, Iowa, and is open through March from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. From April through December it’s open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The museum phone number is (319) 254-2317.

Getting there: Swedesburg, Iowa, is 300 miles southwest of Milwaukee via Interstates 43, 90, 88 and 80, as well as Highways 61, 92 and 218.